Television for serious readers. Hello. Welcome to Cambridge Forum thank you for joining us for what promises to be a timely and somewhat edgy discussion about trust. Huge ramifications in todays complex technological world, the subject of todays forum, and the latest book on the subject. The director of Cambridge Forum, please to have rachel as our guest speaker tonight on the last stop of her 9 week tour which begs the question of why is trust such a hot topic around the world at this point . It is a time when confidence in institutions and governments is at an alltime low but when there has been a surge in the growth of shared Economy Companies like air b b and uber, statistics show we are shifting trust away from institution, and in areas of diversity, and hiring nannies. And transforming trust and exploring the implications for our decisionmaking in life, work and business. And in oxford. She divides her life and lives with her husband and two children and london. We welcome rachel botsman. [applause] thank you. Good evening, every one. Thank you for coming. It is the custom of the holidays, it is lovely to come back to harvard. I havent been back for 18 years which is frightening but it is lovely to be back and excited to talk to you about my work on trust. The trust shift on institution this, i hope i can give you a balanced view on the implications of this shift are both good and bad, in all different areas of our lives. I will talk for a little bit and open it to all your questions. Before i get started i went to get a little bit of a feel for you. If you could just raise your hand, if you have a minute guests on air b b, anyone a host on air b b . Two people. And more trust to be a host or a guest. Does anyone own theory him . Raise your hand. All of you. I talk about that in a little bit. Has anyone been on the dark web . You dont have to tell me what you thought but if you have been there and seen it. Who doesnt know what the dark web is . This is where you can go and find all kinds of things like drugs and guns and pornography. I only go there for Research Purposes was all these things are examples of changing the way we can trust one another. Start with a personal story, a very important story to me. When you become obsessed with the topic enough to dedicate your life to researching it, and ask your self where the fascination has come from and realize my fascination in how we trust people, place our faith, started at a young age. What happened was around the age of 5 my mom decided to go back to work and like many women she needed help. She was going to hire a nanny. For some reason she was in this magazine called the ladies. Of any of your Downton Abbey fans you know that is where people hire their butlers and nannies and so this woman was called doris. I remember the day doris walked into the house, she had big curly hair and very thick scottish accent. Any time she said my name she would roll her ares, and a Salvation Army uniform complete with navy bonnet. These things are very important when they come to trust, they are called signals and trust signals that we knowingly to decide whether someone is trustworthy or not. The problem is some signals are louder than others. It is influenced by the wrong things. Doris lived with us for ten months, and a really good nanny. There wasnt anything suspicious about her until by day 3, worried about where doris is. And your nanny, and doris comes home, find all kinds of things you dont want lying around when you have young children. What happened three days later the police come at the door and arrest my dad. Wasnt a member of the Salvation Army on a sunday for charity. She was robbing banks, and a getaway car. I love this story. I remind my parents, is really interesting, my parents often make judgment. How do they make such a bad decision when it came to doris. We place our faith in people who are untrustworthy. The thing i realized is they thought they had enough information to make a decision about her but they faced a trust gap. This is so profound as to what is happening in Society Today and that is the illusion of information is far more dangerous than ignorance. The way they put this trust has two enemies, not one. The first is mad character. The second is poor in formation. The question i started to ask is how could technology address these problems . Is technology making us smarter about who we trust or is it encouraging us to place our trust in the wrong people in the wrong places. Are we giving our trust away to the wrong things and is technology play a role in that . Why is this an important question . Lets do a quick exercise. You can see where this is going. It will sound loud in this church, you can use it for the person you think is the least trustworthy. When i say the name you do, you only get one. If you think Harvey Weinstein is the least trustworthy person say boo now. One. If you think donald trump is the least trustworthy person say now. Okay. I dont know if you know who this is, sophia the robots, she is the first robot that has citizenship, she was made a citizen of saudi arabia. If you think sophia is the least trustworthy person on this slide cebu now. The robot is more trustworthy than the president of the United States but we dont need to worry about that right now. Lets do this in reverse with you can clap. I would like you to clap for the company you think is most trustworthy. If you think google is the most Trustworthy Company on this slide now. [applause] facebook, who thinks facebook is the most Trustworthy Company on this slide . No one. Amazon. So i think amazon and google, amazon was slightly ahead. I thought one of you might say trust them to do what . This is a really important point and something i find hard when i open the newspapers or media. The way we talk about trust is in general terms, actually very dangerous. We can trust, ridiculous at 3 00 am and negotiate with north korea. Harvey weinstein can make great movies but we dont trust his behavior around women. Amazon is really interesting. When they say they trust amazon they are saying they have confidence dont necessarily trust them to pay taxes or trust their employees well. This is the first thing i would like you to think about. Keep in mind in our own lives but when we talk about leaders and individuals that trust is highly contextual. You can trust me to teach students, do not get in the car with me when you look at the surveys, gallup, harvard, telling the same sad story. And trust is in a state of crisis and where this is coming from if you look at the surveys, trust in all major institutions, charities, religious organizations, big businesses and the media at an alltime historic low. Look at these surveys and dig into the methodology and the way they asked the question is how we do the exercise, do you trust the media . Do you mean readit or the New York Times . What are you trusting the media to do. You can see a historic pattern. What we have is not the institutions at the lowest level, of the sharpest decline. The sharpest decline, the average of 16 points in 12 months which is very significant. All kinds of reasons this is happening. And a lack of faith, lack of faith or confidence in the system, one of the problems, we place our faith, blind faith in a few leaders and they operate behind closed doors and keep things hidden and secret, that wasnt coming out, the weinstein scandal and the movement it created is a symptom of this, institutions cannot protect people no matter how powerful they are they break Peoples Trust but i dont think this narrative that trust is in crisis is still helpful, when it actually does is it amplifies peoples fears and anger and creates a vacuum. I will talk more about that. The other reason i dont like this narrative is i dont think trust is in crisis. There is plenty of trust out there, just flowing in different directions. This trust, the easiest way to give it is energy. You will know energy cant be destroyed. Energy is continually changing form. What is happening is our trust flows upwards, whether that be to leaders, ceos, regulators, experts, academics is being inverted. It is flowing sideways through networks, systems, marketplaces and technologies, sometimes complete strangers, friends on the internet, colleagues and peers so why is this so profound . When you look back historically and history of trust. When you go back and look at how trust is the social glue of society, trust is like liquid gold, human beings cant trade or collaborator cooperate or be vulnerable with one another so trust has always existed but in its first chapter, a long period in history, trust was local, easy to understand, when we all lived in villages, communities and trust is largely personal. Corporate brass and breadth that would tell us what products and services to buy. We invented Real Estate Brokers or lawyers and trust starts flowing directly between people and started through institutions proved im not saying these two forms of trust dont exist and should exist in society, but theres a third form rising up and challenging particularly Institutional Trust is what i call dystrophy did trust and the irony is that this is a trust that flows directly between people again. Its flowing at a scale beyond before and the other person sometimes is a real human beings another time its an artificially intelligent box or algorithm, so what i thought i would explore with you is some of the consequences of how the trust works and how we see it enabling incredible things, but also how we see it can be procured precarious because too much trust in the wrong people isnt necessarily a good thing. So, lets look at this in three different ways. Lets look through three different lenses. First, trusted new ideas and new ideas could be anything. They could be a new technology, but they could be a new political idea. They could be a new philosophy, so how do people build trust in new ideas . Not sure how this will work, but we will try. I think it will be difficult, but lets try. Take out your phone and i want you to just swap your phone with the person behind you or the person next to you. Find someone to swap your phone were with. Make sure its unlocked. Great. Maybe you would swap with that lady there took great. I will give you 20 seconds, you can do whatever you want with that persons phone. Do whatever you want with that persons phone for the next 20 seconds. Go. I see there are some nervous swappers out there. 10 seconds. Its very quiet. Five more seconds. Okay. Give the phones of back. You are also respectful. In this doesnt always happen. I respect some people did not want to play this game so they pretended that they didnt have a phone. I dont believe you. I think you do have a phone and others swamped swap the did not do anything with the phone, just look to the other person and then there was one or two that actually went into the phone and i dont know what you are doing, but you were looking at photos and maybe facebook or sent a message or tweeted something and you had a different relationship with that phone, but what i sense is it was a bit uncomfortable. Only 20 seconds. This is what makes many of these ideas is so remarkable when we use technology whether its a galling a day or share our homes often with complete strangers based on different information. Let me tell you a story that brings this to life. Of these three gentlemen here are brilliant businessman that founded airbnb. Their names are brian, joe and nate and i first met them in 2008, so nine years ago and at the time airbnb is not what it is today. It isnt wasnt what it is today i should say. It was a site where people rented out mattresses in their rooms. Two things happen. I was writing my first book on the sharing economy and i found the opening stories what a tomei editor. This is the example of people taking their assets in creating value from them. No, no, i cannot let you open your book with this story because the company will be dead by the time the book goes to publication and i was glad i sort of stuck to my guns, but if you read it you will see they have like 10000 properties, which is nothing compared to today up your the other person i told was my husband and i came home and his name is chris and i said i think i just met the next ebay and i think we should give them our money. It was actually his money. I was still paying off my harvard loans, but hes a corporate lawyer and said tell me what they do and i said first of all let me tell you about these men because they i can tell you they will be successful because they are so curious about the world and human behavior, but also so resilient and when you see those two things in a human being that often are the dna and the great businessperson, so i went in to like this picture and said bear with me and keep in mind i had these photos. Im not really selling it well, photo is of mattresses on the floor and this is the beginning and their idea is that people around the world will open up their bedroom and bathroom and all those rooms that usually keep hidden from gas and they will take photographs oppose them on on the internet and strangers from all around the world will look to stay in these rooms and this will be the future of travel and he looked at me like i lost the plot like you i give these people in this i dig your money so the first thing he said was what can go wrong, but he said this idea will never work because strangers wont trust one another. Strangers wont trust one another with their home and i said to him, chris, i think you are wrong. Think of ebay. People buy secondhand cars on ebay without driving them. People trade. This is just the beginning and he made a really good point and his point was that ebay was about online transactions, so when you buy something on ebay you dont need that human being and what i was talking about was using the internet to get off the internet and for people to meet facetoface. Now, he was correct in some ways because even nine years ago is really hard to see how Technology Particularly social networks would to change so we could trust one another and he was also really wrong, i mean, really wrong, which for those of you that have gone on airbnb you will see its not just the spare rooms and holiday homes. If you want to make money go to treehouse. Treehouse is one of the most popular categories on airbnb and you can send igloos, stay in aquariums. They actually Just Launched trips. I learned the other day that one of the most popular trips is going to meet someone. I joked with the founders like i just go to treehouse may get a pack of wolves and i dont have to work again because these people are making serious money, some with an hundred 50000 a year or hosting these experiences. What these guys have done is small. Theyve used technology to create a marketplace for assets that never had a marketplace before and this slide, this graph shows it and tells a story airbnb was on top for quite a long time. Marriott did not like it so that i think they made a few accusations. A Company Built on strangers trusting one another is now the second most valuable hospitality brand in the world. I would like to show this graph to my husband as a reminder that he should have listened to me when it comes to future investing decisions, but the other thing i found remarkable is that we have this conversation you know how some conversations stick in your mind and you cant get rid of them . I remembered joe and i said to him youre booting this marketplace. He said where not building a marketplace. We are building a community because marketplaces are built on money and most businesses are built on money and money only goes so far because if you create business that business becomes transactional and so our business is going to be built on a different currency. If money is the currency transaction, trust is the currency of interaction and hes absolutely right. There are very few organizations that are actually builds on the currency of trust, so what did these guys do . Why is it so significant of the story a story . Everyone who raised their hand had taken something that i call a trust leap and a trust are important for progress and innovation and how we advanced as a society because what they represent us when we take a risk as human beings to do something differently from the way weve always done it, so when human beings went to using money was a trust leap. First time people got in an elevator, that was a trust leap. Of the first time you use ebay or put your credit card details and a website, the first time we get into self driving cars let the car take over the wheel will be a trust leap. What technology is doing is its accelerating the pace at which we leap, so its asking us to leap higher and faster than ever before, which is why as human beings we feel so much change, a constant state of change in our lives. Now, how this trust work, how does this trust the work . Doesnt matter if we are tagamet airbnb or self driving cars are placing your faith someone you just met. Trust is a process, not of value, not something we can communicate, not a word, a process that happens between people or things or as we will see algorithms. Whenever us someone to trust they are in the snow state and human beings love being in this state. Thats where we gravitate towards and whenever we also went to trust their something unknown, and a no place, trust in a person, i did in the line between these two things is what we call risk. Risk is the management that matters. Not all risk matters. There is some risk that matters, but risk isnt what forges people. That is trust. The easiest way to think about trust is that its a bridge between the known and unknown and thats why i defined trust they simply as a confident relationship with the unknown. This unknown pieces really important because sometimes people think well, i trust this person because i know the outcome. If you know the outcome, if there is no risk you dont need trust. You only need trust when theres actually uncertainty or a degree of risk and so this explains how trust is actually this magical act to being vulnerable. One said its this weird mixture about fears and their hopes and aspirations, so with the flip side of this. This is what trust is with the unknown and i think its really important to keep in mind for when you look at the flip side of this, for when trust breaks down here could never the great thing about being someone who researches trust is that i have a lot of new material every single week someone or something or some company in the world of breaches our thomas oh equifax, the paradise papers, the phone hacking, volkswagen emission scandal and whats real